71–80 of 110 posts
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Realistically many single parents work two or even more jobs to make ends meet.
That's because the alternative is homelessness. The alternative to an unpaid internship is taking a job you don't like. Not nearly as powerful a motivator.
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This is just abolishing the minimum wage. Since most people don't get paid the minimum wage this would only affect a small number of workers. But the main benefit is that currently unemployable people would actually be able to get hired.
If a job isn't productive enough to provide for the upkeep of the worker (ie: to pay a living wage), why should it exist? At that point, the worker's slow-motion death (or the welfare money society pays to prevent that) are just subsidizing a ridiculously unproductive employer.
I think there is nothing inherently wrong with unpaid internships. If the market price for your work is low enough to only compensate experience gained, that's perfectly fine. What's wrong with the system are more generalize than that, and there are two problems that causes it. I would break it down to A) industrial organizational problem and B) market downturn (and to an extent upturn) + inefficiency and lagging effects.
Part A is more about the over abundance of certain firms in the market supply-demand that makes it very difficult to pay interns. Since I've never worked as a unpaid-intern before (it might happen soon though :/), correct me if I'm wrong, but most of them are either in marketing, legal assistant positions, or journalism. Marketing firms that do not offer paid internships are usually small agencies that are barely able to survive on their own; same thing is true with journalism; the whole legal market has wage flooring that artificially reduces the supply of laws and therefore law firms. It seems to me that these industries needs to better allocate and either become more competitive via innovation, and people going into those industry might want to reconsider their path.
Part B is more on the fact that labor market is inherently inefficient, and in a recession, it exaggerates the underlining problem in part A. This is why we are starting to see more unpaid internship instead of flat wage cuts.
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Err what? Not as crazy... Care to back this statement up with references to said "economists"? If you give organizations the option to employ people and just randomly decide not to pay them, they will at every opportunity NOT pay time. This is basic logic... the motivators for the organization propel this behavior and the American market system will reward them for it - these economists you speak of are likely cracke…
The free market actually doesn't reward this behaviour. Consider that organisations that decide not to pay their workers might very well lose out to those who do. If Organisation A doesn't pay their workers, then all my organisation has to do to steal their productive workers is to offer a wage. Organisation A loses out and eventually has to shut down, while I and the workers win.
- Programmers of any sort who can get the job done in demand. There are more people who want to pay them than programmers available.
- Even inexperienced programmers add value - sometimes a tremendous amount of value. It's not too hard to find a non-critical, short term project that would still be very useful, and the intern starts adding value on day one. So employers are less likely to "do without" if it turns out they have to pay.
- Software interns have a better unpaid internship than the one you're offering - founding their own company. If a recent grad with programming ability is getting outside financial help (the kind that a parent might give to a recent grad doing an unpaid internship in the entertainment industry), that programmer can just try creating an app and seeing how to turn it into something financially viable. They might fail (they probably will fail), but will the experience be worse than a year of not getting paid at a bigco? (It depends, but a lot of companies in high tech would be impressed with someone who took a real crack at creating a financially viable product).
I do occasionally see postings for unpaid cs/engineering internships, posted on campus bulletin boards. They are almost never from actual, high tech companies. These postings generally come from industries accustomed to getting the free interns (publishing, fashion, and so forth) - you know "gain valuable industry experience by writing extenstions in python for our CMS). It feels good to see these posts go up later offering a bit of pay (though still generally much lower than the interns could get elsewhere).
Had they simply looked ahead when enrolling in college, they could have seen that majoring in something like journalism, while enjoyable would lead to brutal competition and low wages. This isn't a situation all interns face, when those in finance, computers, and a few other majors are capable of demanding $25-$35k of compensation for 3 months of a summer internship, it becomes clear this is problem affecting only some industries.
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Ok, so you didn't exploit that worker. Congratulations. But what about the other kid who may or may not have been more qualified than the kid you hired, but couldn't afford to work for free?
Well, what about the folks who also couldn't afford to go to the school that the guy was going to? I mean, ultimately, the big obvious problem of capitalism is that the upkeep of labor is pushed onto the laborer... almost to the point where (to a very small extent) it could be possible that forcing labor to pay for its upkeep while exploiting it for profit is a defining characteristic of capitalism. While I find it t…
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The free market actually doesn't reward this behaviour. Consider that organisations that decide not to pay their workers might very well lose out to those who do. If Organisation A doesn't pay their workers, then all my organisation has to do to steal their productive workers is to offer a wage. Organisation A loses out and eventually has to shut down, while I and the workers win.
Oh bullshit. If Organization A doesn't pay its workers, Organization B will notice that Organization A has gotten away with it. Then, Organization B will stop paying their workers, since after all, each employer who stops paying increases the degree of monopsony buying labor for zero.
I would expect that competing organisations would do anything legal to give them a leg up over the competition, including the hiring of workers they consider productive away from the competition. It's too risky otherwise; all it takes is for some other organisation to offer wages, causing both organisations A and B to lose their productive workers.
Do you disagree with that?
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Honestly comparing an unpaid internship in High School is no where near the same as requiring 20-somethings in college and university to work for free. I also did the unpaid internship thing in high school (which turned in a paid job) and I did a fully paid internships in University. I could not afford to work for free as an 18 year old on my own. It's amazing that in a country with a minimum wage it's still possible…
I'm not saying anything about requiring 20-somethings to work for free. I couldn't have afforded to work for free in college either. I agree that it's a different situation. My point is that I was able to make an informed decision to take an unpaid position, and it benefited me. Had it been a paid position, it either wouldn't have been offered (the department didn't have a lot of money) or would have gone to someone…
I don't believe it's a market problem, it's a social problem. You have this pool of ever increasing free labor not because of the market but because it's now necessary to intern to get a job. If an employer has to choose between someone who will work for free or someone who won't because they can easily get a paying job at Starbucks, who are they going to choose?